Posts Tagged ‘I give it an ‘F’

There was a particularly vicious leftwing assault by leftwing rag The Rolling Stone. The only time I ever hear anything about Rolling Stone Magazine is when they do something particularly vile, because on their best day they are still vile and so why read them? Their last infamous hit piece (on General Stanley McChrystal) was also filled with fraud. But what can you say? Liberals are people who swim in an ocean of lies; and why should they be troubled when the people they trust to lie to them turn out to be dishonest???

There are such lines in the Rolling Stone piece as “Bachmann is a religious zealot whose brain is a raging electrical storm of divine visions and paranoid delusions.” I don’t need to read further than that. It was a toxic, rabid hit piece by toxic, rabid secular humanist liberals.

But let us consider the “standards” of journalism that these people follow. Let us consider who the REAL religious zealots whose brains are raging electrical storms of demonic visions and paranoid delusions are. Let us consider who should have the last laugh, and who should be fired as disgraces:

It’s been a few months since we’ve had ourselves a good-old plagiarism incident to get riled up about. But thanks to Rolling Stone, our sleepy summer Friday just got a bit more scandalous!

The magazine is taking some heat today for lifting quotes in Matt Taibbi’s hit piece on Minnesota’s 2012 Tea Party hopeful Michele Bachmann.

In the story, posted online Wednesday, Taibbi borrows heavily from a 2006 profile of Bachmann by G.R. Anderson, a former Minneapolis City Pages reporter who now teaches journalism at the University of Minnesota. The thin sourcing, as Abe Sauer argues over at The Awl, is part of a “parade of uncredited use of material” from local blogs and reporters who “have dogged Bachmann for years now.”

But the larger issue for journalism’s ethical watchdogs concerns the several unattributed quotes Sauer spotted in Taibbi’s piece, which Rolling Stone executive editor Eric Bates explained away by saying he’d cut out the attributions due to “space concerns” and that he would “get some links included in the story online.”

At least one plagiarism “expert” doesn’t buy Bates’ logic.

“Attribution is the last thing an editor should cut!!!!” Jack Shafer, who is known to grill copy-stealers in his media column for Slate (and who used to edit two alt-weeklies similar to City Pages), told The Cutline via email. “How big was the art hole on that piece? Huge, I’ll bet.”

Shafer added: “If an editor deletes attribution, can the writer be called a plagiarist? I don’t think so. Is that what happened? If Taibbi approved the deletions, it’s another question.”

We emailed Taibbi, who is no stranger to press controversies, with a request for comment and will update this if we hear back.

UPDATE 4 p.m. “I did in fact refer to the City Pages piece in the draft I submitted,” Taibbi told The Cutline. “I did not see that those attributions had been removed. I grew up in alternative newspapers and have been in the position the City Pages reporter is in, so I’m sympathetic. They did good work in that piece and deserve to be credited. But you should know also that this isn’t plagiarism–it’s not even an allegation of plagiarism. It’s an attribution issue.”

In the meantime, Anderson is giving Rolling Stone the benefit of the doubt, although he didn’t let them off the hook entirely.

“I would not consider what the Rolling Stone [piece] contained in it to be plagiarism,” Anderson told City Pages. “What I will say, as a graduate of the Columbia J-School, and an adjunct at the University of Minnesota J-School, I do know that if a student handed in a story with that particular lack of sourcing, not only would I give it an ‘F,’ I would probably put that student on academic fraud.”

You can check out a side-by-side comparison of the two Bachmann profiles over at The Awl.

What is particularly ironic is the use of an image of Michelle Bachmann as holy warrior, gripping the Bible in one hand and a sword dripping in blood in the other as a bloody slaughter continues unabated in the background. It’s an image that is intended to summon the most grisly spectre of the Crusades, of course.

At the worst of the Crusades, the “Christian warriors” were given Absolution for their sins for taking part in the Holy War. You could literally get away with murder. And too many did just that (at least until they found out the hard way that the Pope’s absolution didn’t give them absolution from a just and holy God).

Now, let us consider the irony of the “Absolution” given by the left. Women are sacred cows (now watch me get attacked as calling women “cows”) in liberalism. You do not DARE attack women. Unless they are conservative women like Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann. And then liberals are given total Absolution to attack them as women, as wives, as mothers, as sexual beings, as anything that smears them and degrades them. And they have absolution to do it; no women’s group will come after them. Their sins are pardoned.

Call it a leftwing Crusade; better yet, call it a leftwing jihad. “Kill thee all the enemies of liberalism. Nullus Dues lo volt! [No God wills it!]. Thous hast absolution to murder thine opponents by any means necessary!” And off these “journalists” (or JournoLists) go to do their demonic bidding.

A similar case of such liberal Absolution just occurred with Jon Stewart, who mocked black conservative Herman Cain in an obviously racial and racist manner using his Amos and Andy voice. It’s fine; a Jon Stewart liberal can openly racially mock a black man, provided that black man is a conservative. It’s no different than the most cynical criticism of Pope Pius in the Crusades, who said it was okay to murder as long as you were murdering a Muslim.

I would love nothing more than to have all the Western “journalists” who have played these games grabbed up and taken to a country governed by Islam and watch the look on their formerly smug faces as they were tortured and killed one after another. Until that day, they will continue to serve as useful idiots for communism and terrorism and pretty much every other “ism” that is eroding Western Culture from within.

Add that abject hypocrisy of the left to the fact that for a writer anything resembling plagiarism is the greatest sin imaginable, and you get to see just how utterly vile these people are. They have no honor, no integrity, no decency. Period.

And then we compare the sheer number of plagiarism cases at leftwing papers such as the New York Times (I’ll just drop a couple of names like Jayson Blair and Maureen Dowd and Zachery Kouwe) to conservative papers like the Wall Street Journal, and you see which side simply has no honor, integrity, or decency at all. But what should we expect from such a rabid little bunch of Goebbels? Honesty?

It is also interesting to add that the Crusaders were in fact responding to CENTURIES of Muslim aggression. While many of the monstrous acts that occurred on both sides could never be justified, “the Crusades” themselves were quite justifiable. I make mention of this because the left continues to do to the Crusades what they are doing even today; take the side of the aggressive vicious murderers against Western Culture. And when you look at a major rundown of major plagiarism cases in journalism, it’s the leftwing names like the Washington Post and the Boston Globe and ESPN rather than Fox News.

When America is sufficiently toxic and ripe for judgment, it listens to lies and the bad people who tell those lies and votes for Democrats. That’s basically where we seem to be now.